story10342.xml
Title
story10342.xml
Source
born-digital
Media Type
story
Date Entered
2004-01-16
911DA Story: Story
Attack on America
911 - Facts
At 7:00 o?clock this morning the telephone blasted me out of sound sleep.
?It?s Nita?sorry to wake you but New York has been bombed and DC is on fire?
I hung up the phone in a daze and clicked on the remote control beside my bed. Nita was the neighborhood nut, so probably she was confused.
The TV news proved to be more right than she was, and we sat up in our beds totally in dismay?it was unbelievable what had truly happened.
At 8:45 a.m. EST the World Trade Buildings in New York City were attacked by terrorists who had hijacked our own American Airline Plane Flight 11. American Flight 11 carried 81 passengers. The jet fuel exploded on impact causing colossal fires and explosions and people were seen leaping or being blown out of the upper story windows.
At 9:03 a.m. United Flight 175, with 65 passengers on board crashed into South tower.
At 9:50 a.m. The North Tower collapsed to earth.
At 10:29 a.m. The South Tower imploded and collapsed.
AmericanFlight77, with only 64 aboard crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
United Flight 93, with a skeletal crew of that crashed in Somerset, PA, 23 people were on board
All of these scenes were forever etched in our collective memory by TV cameras, so that all of America became eyewitness to the worst tragedy our country has ever experienced..
By the calculations of a Stanford physicist, the energy impact of one fully-fueled Boeing 767 is 40 times as great as the biggest non-atomic bomb ever dropped by the United States. The terrorists used our own planes to bomb us with jet fuel!
The imploding towers destroyed command centers on the ground and over 200 fire fighters and 70 policemen on the ground were crushed to death.
The World Trade Center Towers themselves house 50,000 workers. They have their own Zip Code, they are that big!. At that early hour it is estimated that a full complement of workers had entered the building. 200,000 estimated additional people a day visit and tour the buildings. It is not known how many are dead, missing or injured. It is totally horrendous! People from 97 different countries of the world were in these towers. It won?t be known for weeks or months who all might have met their death there.
The Towers were built in 1969-1973 at a cost of 750 Million dollars. They were owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. They were now estimated to be worth 5 Billion, but they had only insured one building?never dreaming that anything could happen to both towers at the same time.
The towers occupied 16 acres including a 5 acre plaza. There were 21,800 windows! The top floor housed a restaurant Windows to the World, and the early morning cleaning crew, cooks and bakers were on hand to begin their day. There were 104 elevators in each tower. Elevators were humming up and down. Stairwells were full.
It?s being reported as the Second Pearl Harbor. The devastation, debris and ash on the ground is the look of nuclear winter that movies have portrayed. The smoke and ash are devastating to breathing.
Screams are heard and recorded by video cameras from every direction as people are running for their lives down the middle of streets. Ambulance and police sirens are blaring and taxi cabs are being commandeered to carry doctors and nurses to the scene.
TV news breaks occasionally to implore people to go to Red Cross blood banks and give blood. Some of the lines are five hours long as Americans throng to the Red Cross Centers to give.
All airports are closed down and all flights are cancelled. All Government buildings nationwide are closed. Multi-storied towers in major cities are evacuated and closed down. Universities are closed. Roads to Boulder Dam and nuclear sites are blocked. All the late night comedy shows are shut down, as are awards show. Prize Fights, Baseball, Football and Golf Tournaments are on hold. Disneyland is closed. Disneyland, that place that proclaims to be the ?happiest place on earth? is closed down!
The President was in Florida on a speaking engagement, but is commandeered to Air Force One and taken away to a secret location of safety. It is assumed that he is being taken to Nebraska to the SAC headquarters for disasters. It?s later reported that Air Force One was also a target.
All National and International flights have been cancelled, and the stock market is closed.
This is thought to be an act of the Islamic Jihad, led by the international terrorist organization of multi-millionaire Osama Bin Laden. Television news has shown people in Palestine are dancing in the streets and passing out candy saying ?God is good!? when they heard of the success of the terrorist raids.
No one in America has been untouched by this atrocity. We are haunted by exploding airplaines, falling bodies, collapsing towers, bloodied victims and mourning families.
Thankfully, all of our families are back home now from Krishell and Justin?s wedding last Friday, except Krishell and Justin who are in Singapore or Bali. I?m sure they are two scared spitless kids in a world apart from their families.
Our prayers surround the thousands of families devastated by this act of terrorism. It is so senseless, so despicable. We have been invaded. Our President, George W. Bush has proclaimed this as an act of war!
Since my first writing, three more buildings (out of the five outer buildings) in the complex have collapsed due to instability, plus a hotel nearby is threatened.
President George W. Bush, now back in Washington, DC, has spoken to the people and assured us that this will not be forgotten.
I was just twelve when the Japanese pulled their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, their dignitaries were in Washington negotiating with President Roosevelt. Television had yet to be put on the market, so our minds were not saturated with the visual pictures that are possible today. We only saw newspaper pictures, or News Reels at the show?and those were sometimes weeks later.
It is totally impossible for me to comprehend the degree of hatred involved when people do these dastardly deeds on innocent people. Words like cowardly, evil, even dastardly just don?t cover it.
Our country is devastated, but pulling together as we haven?t seen since World War II years. Sometimes it takes bad times for the people to un-selfishly hold together and show the rest of the world what true freedom of a nation is all about. We may have been lulled by prosperity and good times that we as a country have worked so hard to achieve, but I believe we reached a turning point yesterday. We, as a Nation will never be the same. Hopefully Hollywood, MTV and the Media as a whole will clean up their act and quit polluting the airwaves with their pornography and anti-God messages.
It?s not a coincidence that the date was 9 11?that is our national emergency call for help.
Our President called this an act of war. When one NATO country is attacked it is considered an attack on all of the NATO Alliance. We shall see what this heinous, cowardly act of terrorism brings together as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
Our church, as did many churches across the nation, called for a prayer vigil tonight. The Congress of the United States is having a bi-partisan prayer vigil tomorrow in the Capitol.
Nita, the neighborhood nutcake, may have wakened us from a sound sleep this morning. However, we are wide awake now. Our eyes have been saturated with disaster.
This morning seems like a lifetime ago. We are now awakened to the atrocity, and awakened to possible world war that lies beyond.
Awakened to the admonition in God?s Word, the Holy Bible:
?If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and turn from their wicked ways, I will forgive them and I will heal their land.?
Post Script: A month later we have more facts. Here are some statistics about the WTC:
1. The WTC opened in 1970 after 8 years of construction.
2. The WTC was the dream of David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Nelson Rockefeller, former Governor of New York.
3. The Rockefellers wanted to name the towers after themselves, but the mayor of NY, John Lindsay, insisted on the World Trade Center.
4. The city chose to build the WTC instead of building a new tunnel and large bridge over the Hudson River.
5. The World Trade Center was designed by architect Minoura Yamasaki.
6. According to Yamasaki, downtown Manhattan was the perfect place to erect the towers because there wasn't "a single building worth saving in the
neighborhood."
7. Owners of nearby buildings disagreed, and delayed demolition by three weeks with their protests.
8. Sixteen blocks were cleared to house the completed WTC.
9. More than 10,000 workers involved in building the complex.
10. More than 60 of them died during construction.
11. The excavation work displaced enough soil to create Liberty Park, where four 60-floor towers and four apartment buildings were constructed.
12. The WTC's foundations were laid at 60 feet below ground level.
13. The complex covered 16 acres when finished.
14. In addition to the towers, five other office buildings made up the WTC complex.
15. The WTC had 12 million square feet of space.
16. Each floor was 50,000 square feet.
17. The buildings had their own ZIP codes - 10047 and 10048.
18. The towers were designed to look like a futuristic sculpture.
19. The structure was revolutionary. Its main supports were external, lining the four corners of each tower.
20. Critics condemned the completed buildings as "boring."
21. When completed, the towers were 100 feet taller than the Empire State Building.
22. Until the construction of Chicago's Sears Tower and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the twin towers were the world's tallest buildings.
23. The North Tower's 347 foot radio tower technically allowed the WTC to still call itself the world's tallest building.
24. The towers were different heights. The South tower was 1,362 feet tall, and big brother North tower was 1,368.
25. Sixty-eight miles of steel were used in the construction of the buildings.
26. The concrete poured was enough to build a road from New York to Washington, D.C.
27. The steel inside the WTC could have made three more Brooklyn Bridges.
28. The Twin Towers had more than 16 miles of staircases.
29. There were 43,600 windows.
30. The windows were kept small to reduce the amount of heat or cold entering the building. Regular size windows would have made the heat unbearable in the summertime.
31. The building's 600,000 square feet of glass was cleaned by an automatic machine.
32. The building had 20,000 elevator doors.
33. The WTC housed 239 banks of elevators, including one known as the fastest in the U.S.
34. The main elevators traveled at 27 feet per second and could reach the top in under a minute.
35. There were 828 emergency exit doors. 36. 23,000 fluorescent lightbulbs lit the interior.
37. Originally, there were no light switches in the towers, because energy prices were one-third less than they are today. In 1982, switches were installed.
38. 12,000 miles of electrical cable snaked through the building, supplying power to 15 trading floors for stockbrokers.
39. The 75,000 telephones were maintained by 19,600 miles of cable.
40. There were more than 300 computer mainframes on site.
41. The WTC used more power in one day than most small American cities.
42. Steam supplied by a plant on New York's East River was used to heat the buildings.
43. The buildings housed 49,000 tons of air-conditioning equipment.
44. More than 250,000 cans of paint were needed every year for upkeep of the Towers.
45. The surrounding shopping center complex included 3,250,000 square feet of restaurants and stores.
46. Six banks, five investment firms and three insurance companies called their headquarters there.
47. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had its headquarters in the building.
48. American Express had three floors in the WTC.
49. The WTC was home base for Bank of America.
50. The trade center housed two top restaurants - the Windows on the World and Wild Blue.
51. Windows on the World had one of the best vintage wine collections in the United States.
52. More than 50,000 people worked in the twin towers.
53. By 9 a.m. each weekday morning, the buildings had an average of 35,000 employees at their desks.
54. More than 200,000 people - half of them tourists - moved through the buildings each day.
55. The South Tower had an observation deck that was visited by more than 26,000 people a day.
56. An information sign at the top assured visitors that the buildings had been designed to withstand airplane crashes.
57. The towers could be seen from at least 20 miles away.
58. On a clear day, it was possible to see for 45 miles in every direction from the observation deck.
59. The express elevator to the observation deck was the largest in the U.S. with a 55-person capacity.
60. Every president since 1973 paid a visit to the landmark.
61. President Ronald Reagan watched July 4th fireworks celebrations from the WTC on two occasions.
62. Superstars Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Liza Minelli all sang in WTC restaurants.
63. Two New York TV stations incorporated the twin tower image into their logos.
64. The towers served 10 New York TV stations with 10 antennas on the top.
65. More postcards of the WTC were sent each year than any other building in the world.
66. In 1974, a Frenchman, Phillipe Petit, strung a tightrope between the two towers and walked across.
67. Three men successfully parachuted from the top of the towers.
68. More than a dozen mountain climbers had scaled the building.
69. In 1975 a jobless construction worker parachuted from the South Tower to publicize the plight of the unemployed.
70. The most famous man to climb the building was George Willig - who was arrested at the top.
71. Willig was fined one penny for each of the 110 floors he scaled.
72. Last year, a man in a micro-light aircraft crashed into the North Tower.
73. In the concourse beneath the towers, there were more than 75 stores.
74. Each day, over 150,000 commuters passed through the three subway stations there.
75. Eighty seven tons of food was delivered to the building each day.
76. Over 30,000 cups of coffee were poured daily in the basement cafes.
77. Twenty-two doctors had practices there.
78. Seventeen babies were born on the site.
79. Irv Silverstein recently bought the WTC for almost $3.2 billion.
80. The WTC generated $110 million a year in profit.
81. More than three dozen movies have been filmed there.
82. The best known film to use the WTC as a location was the 1976 remake of King Kong.
83. The 1993 bombing of the WTC killed six people and injured 1,000 more.
84. 1,300 pounds of explosives ripped through the garage in the 1993 attack.
85. That bomb created a crater 16 feet deep and badly damaged inner support beams.
86. Before the 1993 attack, there were three closed circuit television networks for security.
87. After the bombing, the cameras were increased to 300 monitored by computers.
88. More than 300 security guards worked there.
89. The WTC featured security centers on 14 different floors and its own police station.
90. The entrance lobbies had 16 concierge desks and 12 X-ray machines.
91. After the first bombing, no one could get inside the buildings without an I.D. check.
92. It took an average of five minutes for a visitor to pass through security checks.
93. Before the 1993 bombing, there were more than 1,000 parking spaces beneath the buildings, 600 remained afterward.
94. All vehicles using the parking lot had to show FBI security passes.
95. On Sept. 11, the building was 95 percent full, with over 400 tenants.
96 New York Gov. George Pataki had an office in the WTC, but wasn't there when the disaster struck.
97. Both the Secret Service and the FBI rented office space there.
98. $110.3 million in gold and 120.7 million in silver is buried in the rubble.
99. The combined weight of the towers was more than 1.5 million tons.
100. Each tower was built to safely sway about three feet during strong wind storms.
101. Blue Cross-Blue Shield, New York's largest health insurance company, moved into the building 3 years ago.
102. Nine chapels serving six different faiths called the WTC home.
103. Twenty-nine countries had trade mission offices in the buildings.
104. Every major U.S. airline had ticket offices inside the WTC.
105. It is the first skyscraper in the world destroyed by terrorists.
Thelly, the Storylady, Cardiff by the Sea
For a virtual visit go to http://lifestorywriting.net/
Join the fun at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lifestory/
For Quiet Moments http://www.gospelcom.net/rbc/odb/odb.shtml
911 - Facts
At 7:00 o?clock this morning the telephone blasted me out of sound sleep.
?It?s Nita?sorry to wake you but New York has been bombed and DC is on fire?
I hung up the phone in a daze and clicked on the remote control beside my bed. Nita was the neighborhood nut, so probably she was confused.
The TV news proved to be more right than she was, and we sat up in our beds totally in dismay?it was unbelievable what had truly happened.
At 8:45 a.m. EST the World Trade Buildings in New York City were attacked by terrorists who had hijacked our own American Airline Plane Flight 11. American Flight 11 carried 81 passengers. The jet fuel exploded on impact causing colossal fires and explosions and people were seen leaping or being blown out of the upper story windows.
At 9:03 a.m. United Flight 175, with 65 passengers on board crashed into South tower.
At 9:50 a.m. The North Tower collapsed to earth.
At 10:29 a.m. The South Tower imploded and collapsed.
AmericanFlight77, with only 64 aboard crashed into the Pentagon in Washington, DC.
United Flight 93, with a skeletal crew of that crashed in Somerset, PA, 23 people were on board
All of these scenes were forever etched in our collective memory by TV cameras, so that all of America became eyewitness to the worst tragedy our country has ever experienced..
By the calculations of a Stanford physicist, the energy impact of one fully-fueled Boeing 767 is 40 times as great as the biggest non-atomic bomb ever dropped by the United States. The terrorists used our own planes to bomb us with jet fuel!
The imploding towers destroyed command centers on the ground and over 200 fire fighters and 70 policemen on the ground were crushed to death.
The World Trade Center Towers themselves house 50,000 workers. They have their own Zip Code, they are that big!. At that early hour it is estimated that a full complement of workers had entered the building. 200,000 estimated additional people a day visit and tour the buildings. It is not known how many are dead, missing or injured. It is totally horrendous! People from 97 different countries of the world were in these towers. It won?t be known for weeks or months who all might have met their death there.
The Towers were built in 1969-1973 at a cost of 750 Million dollars. They were owned by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. They were now estimated to be worth 5 Billion, but they had only insured one building?never dreaming that anything could happen to both towers at the same time.
The towers occupied 16 acres including a 5 acre plaza. There were 21,800 windows! The top floor housed a restaurant Windows to the World, and the early morning cleaning crew, cooks and bakers were on hand to begin their day. There were 104 elevators in each tower. Elevators were humming up and down. Stairwells were full.
It?s being reported as the Second Pearl Harbor. The devastation, debris and ash on the ground is the look of nuclear winter that movies have portrayed. The smoke and ash are devastating to breathing.
Screams are heard and recorded by video cameras from every direction as people are running for their lives down the middle of streets. Ambulance and police sirens are blaring and taxi cabs are being commandeered to carry doctors and nurses to the scene.
TV news breaks occasionally to implore people to go to Red Cross blood banks and give blood. Some of the lines are five hours long as Americans throng to the Red Cross Centers to give.
All airports are closed down and all flights are cancelled. All Government buildings nationwide are closed. Multi-storied towers in major cities are evacuated and closed down. Universities are closed. Roads to Boulder Dam and nuclear sites are blocked. All the late night comedy shows are shut down, as are awards show. Prize Fights, Baseball, Football and Golf Tournaments are on hold. Disneyland is closed. Disneyland, that place that proclaims to be the ?happiest place on earth? is closed down!
The President was in Florida on a speaking engagement, but is commandeered to Air Force One and taken away to a secret location of safety. It is assumed that he is being taken to Nebraska to the SAC headquarters for disasters. It?s later reported that Air Force One was also a target.
All National and International flights have been cancelled, and the stock market is closed.
This is thought to be an act of the Islamic Jihad, led by the international terrorist organization of multi-millionaire Osama Bin Laden. Television news has shown people in Palestine are dancing in the streets and passing out candy saying ?God is good!? when they heard of the success of the terrorist raids.
No one in America has been untouched by this atrocity. We are haunted by exploding airplaines, falling bodies, collapsing towers, bloodied victims and mourning families.
Thankfully, all of our families are back home now from Krishell and Justin?s wedding last Friday, except Krishell and Justin who are in Singapore or Bali. I?m sure they are two scared spitless kids in a world apart from their families.
Our prayers surround the thousands of families devastated by this act of terrorism. It is so senseless, so despicable. We have been invaded. Our President, George W. Bush has proclaimed this as an act of war!
Since my first writing, three more buildings (out of the five outer buildings) in the complex have collapsed due to instability, plus a hotel nearby is threatened.
President George W. Bush, now back in Washington, DC, has spoken to the people and assured us that this will not be forgotten.
I was just twelve when the Japanese pulled their sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. At the time, their dignitaries were in Washington negotiating with President Roosevelt. Television had yet to be put on the market, so our minds were not saturated with the visual pictures that are possible today. We only saw newspaper pictures, or News Reels at the show?and those were sometimes weeks later.
It is totally impossible for me to comprehend the degree of hatred involved when people do these dastardly deeds on innocent people. Words like cowardly, evil, even dastardly just don?t cover it.
Our country is devastated, but pulling together as we haven?t seen since World War II years. Sometimes it takes bad times for the people to un-selfishly hold together and show the rest of the world what true freedom of a nation is all about. We may have been lulled by prosperity and good times that we as a country have worked so hard to achieve, but I believe we reached a turning point yesterday. We, as a Nation will never be the same. Hopefully Hollywood, MTV and the Media as a whole will clean up their act and quit polluting the airwaves with their pornography and anti-God messages.
It?s not a coincidence that the date was 9 11?that is our national emergency call for help.
Our President called this an act of war. When one NATO country is attacked it is considered an attack on all of the NATO Alliance. We shall see what this heinous, cowardly act of terrorism brings together as far as the rest of the world is concerned.
Our church, as did many churches across the nation, called for a prayer vigil tonight. The Congress of the United States is having a bi-partisan prayer vigil tomorrow in the Capitol.
Nita, the neighborhood nutcake, may have wakened us from a sound sleep this morning. However, we are wide awake now. Our eyes have been saturated with disaster.
This morning seems like a lifetime ago. We are now awakened to the atrocity, and awakened to possible world war that lies beyond.
Awakened to the admonition in God?s Word, the Holy Bible:
?If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and turn from their wicked ways, I will forgive them and I will heal their land.?
Post Script: A month later we have more facts. Here are some statistics about the WTC:
1. The WTC opened in 1970 after 8 years of construction.
2. The WTC was the dream of David Rockefeller, chairman of the Chase Manhattan Bank, and Nelson Rockefeller, former Governor of New York.
3. The Rockefellers wanted to name the towers after themselves, but the mayor of NY, John Lindsay, insisted on the World Trade Center.
4. The city chose to build the WTC instead of building a new tunnel and large bridge over the Hudson River.
5. The World Trade Center was designed by architect Minoura Yamasaki.
6. According to Yamasaki, downtown Manhattan was the perfect place to erect the towers because there wasn't "a single building worth saving in the
neighborhood."
7. Owners of nearby buildings disagreed, and delayed demolition by three weeks with their protests.
8. Sixteen blocks were cleared to house the completed WTC.
9. More than 10,000 workers involved in building the complex.
10. More than 60 of them died during construction.
11. The excavation work displaced enough soil to create Liberty Park, where four 60-floor towers and four apartment buildings were constructed.
12. The WTC's foundations were laid at 60 feet below ground level.
13. The complex covered 16 acres when finished.
14. In addition to the towers, five other office buildings made up the WTC complex.
15. The WTC had 12 million square feet of space.
16. Each floor was 50,000 square feet.
17. The buildings had their own ZIP codes - 10047 and 10048.
18. The towers were designed to look like a futuristic sculpture.
19. The structure was revolutionary. Its main supports were external, lining the four corners of each tower.
20. Critics condemned the completed buildings as "boring."
21. When completed, the towers were 100 feet taller than the Empire State Building.
22. Until the construction of Chicago's Sears Tower and the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, the twin towers were the world's tallest buildings.
23. The North Tower's 347 foot radio tower technically allowed the WTC to still call itself the world's tallest building.
24. The towers were different heights. The South tower was 1,362 feet tall, and big brother North tower was 1,368.
25. Sixty-eight miles of steel were used in the construction of the buildings.
26. The concrete poured was enough to build a road from New York to Washington, D.C.
27. The steel inside the WTC could have made three more Brooklyn Bridges.
28. The Twin Towers had more than 16 miles of staircases.
29. There were 43,600 windows.
30. The windows were kept small to reduce the amount of heat or cold entering the building. Regular size windows would have made the heat unbearable in the summertime.
31. The building's 600,000 square feet of glass was cleaned by an automatic machine.
32. The building had 20,000 elevator doors.
33. The WTC housed 239 banks of elevators, including one known as the fastest in the U.S.
34. The main elevators traveled at 27 feet per second and could reach the top in under a minute.
35. There were 828 emergency exit doors. 36. 23,000 fluorescent lightbulbs lit the interior.
37. Originally, there were no light switches in the towers, because energy prices were one-third less than they are today. In 1982, switches were installed.
38. 12,000 miles of electrical cable snaked through the building, supplying power to 15 trading floors for stockbrokers.
39. The 75,000 telephones were maintained by 19,600 miles of cable.
40. There were more than 300 computer mainframes on site.
41. The WTC used more power in one day than most small American cities.
42. Steam supplied by a plant on New York's East River was used to heat the buildings.
43. The buildings housed 49,000 tons of air-conditioning equipment.
44. More than 250,000 cans of paint were needed every year for upkeep of the Towers.
45. The surrounding shopping center complex included 3,250,000 square feet of restaurants and stores.
46. Six banks, five investment firms and three insurance companies called their headquarters there.
47. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey had its headquarters in the building.
48. American Express had three floors in the WTC.
49. The WTC was home base for Bank of America.
50. The trade center housed two top restaurants - the Windows on the World and Wild Blue.
51. Windows on the World had one of the best vintage wine collections in the United States.
52. More than 50,000 people worked in the twin towers.
53. By 9 a.m. each weekday morning, the buildings had an average of 35,000 employees at their desks.
54. More than 200,000 people - half of them tourists - moved through the buildings each day.
55. The South Tower had an observation deck that was visited by more than 26,000 people a day.
56. An information sign at the top assured visitors that the buildings had been designed to withstand airplane crashes.
57. The towers could be seen from at least 20 miles away.
58. On a clear day, it was possible to see for 45 miles in every direction from the observation deck.
59. The express elevator to the observation deck was the largest in the U.S. with a 55-person capacity.
60. Every president since 1973 paid a visit to the landmark.
61. President Ronald Reagan watched July 4th fireworks celebrations from the WTC on two occasions.
62. Superstars Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Mick Jagger and Liza Minelli all sang in WTC restaurants.
63. Two New York TV stations incorporated the twin tower image into their logos.
64. The towers served 10 New York TV stations with 10 antennas on the top.
65. More postcards of the WTC were sent each year than any other building in the world.
66. In 1974, a Frenchman, Phillipe Petit, strung a tightrope between the two towers and walked across.
67. Three men successfully parachuted from the top of the towers.
68. More than a dozen mountain climbers had scaled the building.
69. In 1975 a jobless construction worker parachuted from the South Tower to publicize the plight of the unemployed.
70. The most famous man to climb the building was George Willig - who was arrested at the top.
71. Willig was fined one penny for each of the 110 floors he scaled.
72. Last year, a man in a micro-light aircraft crashed into the North Tower.
73. In the concourse beneath the towers, there were more than 75 stores.
74. Each day, over 150,000 commuters passed through the three subway stations there.
75. Eighty seven tons of food was delivered to the building each day.
76. Over 30,000 cups of coffee were poured daily in the basement cafes.
77. Twenty-two doctors had practices there.
78. Seventeen babies were born on the site.
79. Irv Silverstein recently bought the WTC for almost $3.2 billion.
80. The WTC generated $110 million a year in profit.
81. More than three dozen movies have been filmed there.
82. The best known film to use the WTC as a location was the 1976 remake of King Kong.
83. The 1993 bombing of the WTC killed six people and injured 1,000 more.
84. 1,300 pounds of explosives ripped through the garage in the 1993 attack.
85. That bomb created a crater 16 feet deep and badly damaged inner support beams.
86. Before the 1993 attack, there were three closed circuit television networks for security.
87. After the bombing, the cameras were increased to 300 monitored by computers.
88. More than 300 security guards worked there.
89. The WTC featured security centers on 14 different floors and its own police station.
90. The entrance lobbies had 16 concierge desks and 12 X-ray machines.
91. After the first bombing, no one could get inside the buildings without an I.D. check.
92. It took an average of five minutes for a visitor to pass through security checks.
93. Before the 1993 bombing, there were more than 1,000 parking spaces beneath the buildings, 600 remained afterward.
94. All vehicles using the parking lot had to show FBI security passes.
95. On Sept. 11, the building was 95 percent full, with over 400 tenants.
96 New York Gov. George Pataki had an office in the WTC, but wasn't there when the disaster struck.
97. Both the Secret Service and the FBI rented office space there.
98. $110.3 million in gold and 120.7 million in silver is buried in the rubble.
99. The combined weight of the towers was more than 1.5 million tons.
100. Each tower was built to safely sway about three feet during strong wind storms.
101. Blue Cross-Blue Shield, New York's largest health insurance company, moved into the building 3 years ago.
102. Nine chapels serving six different faiths called the WTC home.
103. Twenty-nine countries had trade mission offices in the buildings.
104. Every major U.S. airline had ticket offices inside the WTC.
105. It is the first skyscraper in the world destroyed by terrorists.
Thelly, the Storylady, Cardiff by the Sea
For a virtual visit go to http://lifestorywriting.net/
Join the fun at http://groups.yahoo.com/group/lifestory/
For Quiet Moments http://www.gospelcom.net/rbc/odb/odb.shtml
Collection
Citation
“story10342.xml,” September 11 Digital Archive, accessed January 8, 2025, https://911digitalarchive.org/items/show/13245.